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Emily Alford

Laughing all the Way
(Ha, Ha, Ha)

By Emily Alford

You can tell a lot about an epoch by why and how it laughs. "Why" means the actual subject, which can be pretty much anything. "How" means the mode, and to my mind that suggests one of two ways. One way is ridicule, which implies unease with the subject, if not outright fear of it. The other way is enjoyment. And that implies empathy, understanding, maybe even identity.

Consider the different ways that white Americans have laughed about the subject of race. Early in the nineteenth century vicious cartoons and prints began to appear in the North about newly-freed African-Americans. What those cartoons betrayed was the unease of white folks about the consequences of slavery's destruction among them and around them. The same point is true of the minstrel shows of the Jim Crow era, throughout the land. In both instances the laughter suggested that the whole idea was ridiculous. How utterly silly, the hidden message ran, that these people should be free at all, let alone that they should have a claim to be equal!

Compare the same subject now, as handled by Bill Cosby, or Eddie Murphy. Their great theme is the same: the undeniable problems that go with being black in a world that white folks run. But Cosby and Murphy invite us — all of us — to identify with them as they cope with those problems, not to poke fun at them for their daring to cope at all. So too with us, our specific us, the transgendered of the very late twentieth century.

Being on the high side of fifty, I can remember Milton Berle's outrageous drag performances on mid-century television. I was already a secret crossdresser and I already was dreaming about being a girl. Still, I knew that the acceptable response was to hoot. So I hooted. Sort of, anyway... as convincingly as I could. Which is as good a case of self-hatred as I can imagine. Now, four decades later, I look back on it with an historian's eye, and my historian's mind starts to wonder. Was there some connection between Berle's crinolines and wigs, and the deep disturbance that Christine Jorgensen had provoked in mid-century American middle-class culture? Jorgensen certainly became a subject of uneasy banter in my all-boys high school, at about the same time. How many in addition to myself were masking what we wanted and what we secretly did, with uneasy, forced guffaws, ridiculing what, in fact, we were? How totally laughable that a man should put on skirts, like Berle. How utterly ridiculous (and how terribly fearful) that a man should really become a woman, like Christine.

Compare any number of instances now. One, certainly, is the current ad campaign that features Ru Paul in an extremely elegant male costume, announcing that he has "no problems" with being a man. He wears the mustache that signifies uncomplicated masculinity in the African-American male code. He leans upon a phallic cane, as if to underscore the point. But, few people in contemporary America can miss the point: this proud-to-be-a-man is a drag queen for very real, with none of the uncertainty that Uncle Miltie's crinolines used to betray. We may smile at the conceit, but we do not laugh at him. There is no ridicule involved. If we laugh, it is because we enjoy the joke.

That's hardly the only instance. About a month ago I was listening to a Blues program as I drove along. The Blues is mostly sad, but it's also defiant about what causes the sadness. One track told of a family's break up, because a wife had caught her husband with another woman when she came home. That's a standard Blues image. It's not a funny subject, especially from a child's point of view, and the grown-up child of that failed marriage was singing the song. But within the song the point of view shifted, from the boy telling the story to his errant father, who had lived it, and who wanted understanding. Gradually it emerged that the other woman who caused the break up was the father himself. The whole song was a spoof on blues conventions, but there was an undertone of seriousness, and of asking for empathy in the choral refrain: "a man's gotta do what a woman's gotta do."

Not long afterward Garrison Keillor got at the same point in his Public Radio program, "A Prairie Home Companion." One of his recurrent skits sends up the old Humphrey Bogart "film noir" hard-boiled detective genre. The Keillor series is called "Guy Noir, Private Eye." In the program I'm thinking of, "Guy" is dealing with a tough cop — who metamorphoses into an incredibly lovely woman for the sake of deep cover. The cop's voice is included in the change, from rasping masculine to utterly womanly. Didn't TG Forum used to run some marvelous writing along that line? "Guy" finds himself really attracted to "her." Had the scriptwriter been reading this site?

Examples have begun to multiply. I'm in a cinema waiting for the feature to start, and two separate trailers for forthcoming films are screened. Both deal with gender crossing. One film is the animated "A Bug's Life," which includes the complexities of being a male Ladybug. In the other trailer, for "Enemy of the State," the central, sympathetic male character is asked by male heavies why he had bought some lingerie. Was it for his wife? No, he replies, it was for him, for some "weekend cross-dressing." Did he mean it? Probably not, but I can't say for sure. I haven't seen the film yet. It's funny, but the point is that crossdressing is something a person might do. Clearly, we the audience are expected to identify with the guy who claims he does it in order to save his skin, not to hoot.

It isn't just in the movies. I'm wandering through my local supermarket and I notice that "A Bug's Life" is among the children's books on sale. I pick up the book and I find the same theme as in the film: it's okay to be a boy in the ostensible garb of a girl. On the same shelf I notice the book from another Disney film, "Mulan" That film starts off with a girl who is definitely a girl. It unashamedly endorses her crossing from female to male. The times are hard, and a woman's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

And none of it, not the Ru Paul ad, not the Garrison Keillor sketch, not the Hollywood trailers and spin-off children's books, no, none of it is vicious. There is viciousness out there of course, a murderous lot of it. An ad, a radio program, some film trailers, and some children's books drawn from the same films: these do not change the fact that being black in East Texas, being gay in Wyoming, being F2M transgender in the midwest, being a physician in upstate New York or Canada who acts within the law to help women with undesired pregnancies, all of these can get a person killed. The hatred will not go away. It's up to all of us who might potentially feel its horrible effects to do all we can against it, whoever might be its immediate target. There is also laughter, though, warm laughter about the very qualities that some people hate so much in others that the death of the "other" results. It isn't the laughter of ridicule and fear. It's the laughter of enjoyment, and perhaps even the laughter of empathy. It isn't about otherness at all. To me, at least, that looks like a very hopeful sign.

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